Welcome back to Guitardoor.com, where we celebrate the foundational players who, in a few brief, brilliant moments, changed the world. Today, we pay tribute to a man whose name you may not know, but whose playing you have heard a thousand times: the incredible Danny Cedrone. As the session guitarist for Bill Haley & His Comets, Cedrone was the man who, for a $21 session fee, recorded what is arguably the single most important, influential, and flat-out electrifying guitar solo in the history of rock and roll.
The Sound of an Explosion
The sound of Danny Cedrone was the sound of a musical atom being split, the very big bang of rock and roll lead guitar. In the early 1950s, the guitar was still finding its voice as a lead instrument, often taking a backseat to the saxophone or piano. But Cedrone, a highly skilled and seasoned jazz and C&W player, brought a level of technical fire and raw excitement that was completely revolutionary. His playing was a thrilling, high-speed collision of sophisticated jazz phrasing, country twang, and a new, raw, high-energy attack that would become the very blueprint for the rock and roll guitar solo.
Anatomy of a Rock and Roll Pioneer
The genius of Danny Cedrone’s playing was his ability to pack a novel’s worth of excitement and technical brilliance into a few short bars. He was not a traditional blues player; he was a sophisticated musician with a background in the complex harmony of jazz. This allowed him to create solos that were not just fast, but also harmonically inventive, full of arpeggios, chromatic runs, and a level of fluid precision that was simply jaw-dropping for its time. His style was a masterclass in controlled chaos, a sound that was both wildly exciting and incredibly precise. His legendary, world-changing tone came from a 1946 Gibson ES-300, a full-bodied archtop guitar with a single P-90 pickup, plugged into a small Gibson BR-1 combo amp. This setup gave him a tone that was bright, clear, and articulate, yet with just enough grit to sound dangerous when he dug in.
The Essential Solos That Built Rock
Danny Cedrone’s legacy is defined by two monumental solos, recorded for Bill Haley, which essentially served as the birth of the rock and roll lead guitar. Tragically, he would not live to see the global explosion his playing would ignite, as he died in a fall just two months after recording his most famous work.
(We’re Gonna) Rock This Joint
This 1952 recording is “Patient Zero” for the rock and roll guitar solo. It’s a frantic, blistering, and brilliantly unhinged performance that still sounds exciting today. To approach playing it, the key is to master the lightning-fast, descending, chromatic-style runs. The solo is a masterclass in alternate picking at high speed, combined with jazzy, arpeggiated phrases. The challenge is not just to play the notes, but to play them with the wild, freewheeling, and slightly “un-gonna-come-unglued” energy that Cedrone perfected.
Rock Around the Clock
This is it. The solo that started it all. Recorded in a rushed, end-of-session take in April 1954, Cedrone (who reportedly hadn’t had time to work up a new solo) recycled and polished his break from “Rock This Joint.” The result was history. It’s a 12-bar masterpiece of composition. To approach this, a guitarist must learn it note-for-note. It starts with a furiously picked, straight-sixteenth-note phrase, then cleverly shifts into a triplet-based, swinging, jazzy feel in the middle, before climaxing with that iconic, lightning-fast descending flurry. It is a perfect piece of musical storytelling, a jaw-dropping burst of energy that, nearly 70 years later, is still the definitive rock and roll guitar solo.
In the end, Danny Cedrone’s legacy is that of the ultimate unsung hero. He is the man who played the solo heard ’round the world, a brilliant musician whose fiery, inventive, and technically dazzling playing set the standard for every rock guitarist who followed. While he never lived to see the global phenomenon he helped create, his few, perfect, recorded moments are immortal, a permanent and explosive part of the very DNA of rock and roll.
